Bye-bye, bandage dress. This fall, designers are offering up a new, confident vision of dressing inspired by the grandeur of midcentury couture.

Raf Simons, the Belgian-born creative director of Jil Sander, is not one for lowest-common-denominator dressing. "Let's say you are in an environment where 50 women are dressed in minidresses, body stretch, or something with a clear accentuation of the body," Simons says. "And then there is one woman who is very much the opposite—she would have a white shirt on, say, and a huge, couture-inspired skirt." He's referring to the simple jersey tops tucked into sweeping, cinched-waist ball-gown skirts in pastels and candy brights that opened his blockbuster Jil Sander spring 2011 show. "Me, as a person, automatically I would be much more attracted to that woman, because she has a fascinating and different approach. She stands against all the others. I think, Who is she? What is she about? What's her psychology? Why does she do this?"

Given his curiosity, it's no wonder Simons kept this woman in mind when conceiving his fall collection, applying the same majestic sense of volume to stiffened cocoonlike dresses and wool coats with dropped shoulders and ample folds at the back, as well as to bold-hued skirts and tops, which he fluffed up with goose down for a subtle—and alluring—marshmallow feel. And while these looks would garner more than a few sideways glances on the street, in the office, or at the local bar, for Simons and his growing fan base, standing out—raising more questions than you answer—is precisely the point of going out.

This fall, Simons and other confident designers are proposing an audacious, thought-provoking ideal for everyday fashion—an antidote to a decade of cookie-cutter sameness (thank the Hilton, Kardashian, or Housewife of your choice)—rooted in the swagger of midcentury haute couture. Taking their cues from master craftsmen such as Christian Dior and Cristobal Balenciaga, they're transforming wasp-waisted jackets, hobble skirts, bubble coats, and barrel-shape dresses into elevated yet accessible ready-to-wear for women willing to pay a premium for resolutely distinctive clothes.

While this could be a risky proposition in our Who Wore It Best? age—trade your bandage dress and jeans-and-tee for potentially man-repelling fare such as a Balenciaga-esque slackened chemise, or a peplum jacket and kicky skirt à la Dior—the fall runways are making it a much easier sell. Junya Watanabe spun Dior's New Look into a punkish statement with molded-leather, flared-at-the-hip moto jackets paired with knee-length black kilts; at Givenchy, Riccardo Tisci gave his darkly cool girl a new, severe '50s-inspired waist; Marc Jacobs sent Naomi Campbell and Kate Moss down his stylized Louis Vuitton runway (models entered through wrought-iron elevator facades in a smoky ode to Charlotte Rampling in 1974's The Night Porter) in sculpted corset tops; and in his second stab at women's wear, Thom Browne pumped extreme volume into rounded-shoulder tops and egg-shape minis.

Rather than one's boobs or butt (or bank account), these distinctive silhouettes, steeped as they are in the refinement of fashion's golden age, put something much more elusive on exhibit—your sophistication. "These are not easy-to-understand shapes," says Valerie Steele, director and chief curator of the Museum at the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York City. "These clothes come out of a tradition where it's much more about connoisseurship, understanding fabric, motion, how it feels when you put them on."

And this could be part of the allure for today's jaded consumers. "I think women are ready to think about dressing again, in a simple way but an elegant way," says Linda Dresner, whose namesake Birmingham, Michigan, boutique stocks Jil Sander, Junya Watanabe, and Givenchy. After years of "so many skinny, tight clothes, the eye becomes tired," she says. "We in fashion always have a need to make something feel new. And little by little, we have to try to infect women with that desire to try it."

Which is to say women haven't whole-heartedly embraced the trend ("Some women really like it, and some people really don't," according to Dresner). It might come down to shifting the way we conceive of dressing—what if women were bolstered more by elaborately structured garments and heroic, time-tested shapes than by male attention? Simons, for one, is curious to see where that scenario leads. "Women go to events, to dinners, or to whatever social environment in a minidress that's very, very, very body-conscious," he says. "And it's not that I criticize, because I have been there with Jil, but it just made me think about what could be the answer to it, what comes after."

In this sense, Simons and his comrades are not unlike Dior and Balenciaga, who sought to discover the next step for high style in the sober postwar years. In 1947, when a then-obscure Dior revealed a debut collection of suits and dresses featuring tiny, corseted waists, padded hips, and decadently full skirts, his lavish construction and voluptuous silhouette—what became the much-referenced New Look—was seen as the ultimate retort to the nearly decadelong austerity of war-torn Europe. (The photographer and costume designer Cecil Beaton, picking up on the silhouette's belle epoque feel, called it a "brilliant nostalgia.") Despite protests over the blatant profligacy of skirts that used up to 27 yards of fabric at a time when rationing was not yet a memory, Dior's unapologetically feminine style was soon adopted by Europe's upper crust. In the States, the look was heralded by fashion editors and duplicated by department stores, which offered more affordable (and less rigorously structured) versions in the popular A-line dress.

As Dior embraced old-school opulence and hips-forward femininity, the Basque couturier Cristobal Balenciaga was taking a more abstract tack in tantalizing the fashionable set. With a keen sense of color and deft construction skills, he crafted vivid gowns with inflated volumes reminiscent of Spanish royal dress (e.g., his hoop-skirted satin Infanta ball gown), and later, sophisticated curvilinear coats with unexpected folds, and in the '50s and '60s, form-skimming sack and chemise dresses, which injected a quiet intellectualism into daywear. As famed editor Diana Vreeland once mused, "In a Balenciaga, you were the only woman in the room—no other woman existed.

"This history has proved rich source material for Giambattista Valli, who, in his six years in business, has wooed a rarefied set of self-possessed socialites (whose mothers or grandmothers likely patronized the aforementioned houses) with his modern interpretations of couture forms. "I'm always struck by these two opposite silhouettes—the lightness and tight waist of '50s Dior and the more boxy, experimental cuts of the '60s," says Valli, who for fall sent out Infanta-esque cape coats, fitted skirts, and poufy gowns, as well as surgically precise looks in a newly subdued palette comprised mostly of slate gray, black, and cream. "Everybody has a point of inspiration, and for me, it is couture, but done in ready-to-wear in a very dynamic way."

The versions of Dior that abounded at Junya Watanabe were more real-world appropriate, and exponentially more ironic. For fall, the cult Japanese designer, an expert in appropriation and cultural hop-scotching (he's taken on African garb, hikers, and the puffer jacket, among other things), unleashed a troop of fauxhawked models in a new New Look, Bar jackets and all, crafted out of hefty biker leathers and grunge-feel skirts. "My approach is to express beautiful forms that anyone from the past to the present could recognize," Watanabe says, "but adding a combination of images that could never be expected in the past." While unexpected, these pieces, especially the supple jackets, will no doubt find their way into many women's closets—they're arch without the buzz-killing artifice.

By contrast, Givenchy's Tisci took pause from his beloved Gothic and religious tropes and recent menswear fascination, giving his fall collection a rigorous waist-attenuation so clearly indebted to the '50s couture silhouette that it seemed a plausible audition for the vacant design post at Dior. Playing with baroque and panther motifs (a scarf print, emblazoned on duchesse sweatshirts and dresses, incorporated both), Tisci wrought the hourglass as an aggressively kinky statement, finishing vinyl and sheer-black pencil skirts with flared peplums and see-through blouses, and lending rigid shape to a series of A-line skirts with transparent nylon organza panels.

If the market for such stuff is minute, it is apparently of little consequence. "I don't kid myself thinking I'm putting something in front of people that everyone's going to love," says Thom Browne, whose fall show featured models peeling off nun garb(!) to reveal shrunken plaid suiting, molded-wool tulip skirts, preppy dresses topped with rounded-shoulder coats in felted cashmere, even a varsity jacket worked into an elongated hourglass. "I want to make sure that I do things that a girl can wear confidently, and be comfortable in something that's not ordinary.

"Indeed, how these intricately constructed clothes feel—their psychologically and physically empowering structure—is a key selling point, especially for a designer like Francisco Costa at Calvin Klein, a label known for an understated, high-minded aesthetic and high prices. "When you talk about couture," says Costa, who worked precisely curved seaming in fall's bomberlike coats and tented dresses, "the cuts are so much more interesting—it's a detachment from the basic ready-to-wear." He runs down the time-consuming manipulations necessary to create unexpected volume in one of his seemingly simple looks (moving the armholes slightly forward, shifting the shoulder seams to the back, etc.). For the wearer, this amounts to a value-added proposition: Buying one of these pieces shows that you understand cut and appreciate technique—you know your fashion history. You've gained entrance into a superexclusive sorority of gallerists and other cultivated types who share a winking dress code rather than a handshake. In a Calvin Klein cocoon coat, you could even be its social chair.

But what about the sex appeal? "It's not clothing to get you a date," says Cameron Silver, owner of L.A.'s celeb-approved vintage mecca Decades. "It's more about clothing to celebrate your taste." In other words, it's got a fabulous personality.

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